Not Gonna Die on That Hill

  --“Lily” calls for violence and death 

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back 
--The Road Not Taken,
Robert Frost

Things go up, things go down,
but at least the Lord is always around 
--There Will be Blood (2007)

Pictures of Lily made my life so wonderful
Pictures of Lily helped me sleep at night
 Pictures of Lily solved my childhood problems
Pictures of Lily helped me feel alright 
--Pictures of Lily,
The Who 

_________________________

From among the people protesting the election of Donald Trump, CNN featured “Lily”, a sign-carrying Latina woman from Los Angeles who called for blood and death. Why this would have to happen for her was unclear.

Lily appeared like your prototypical American, what Ranger calls, the “fat, dumb and happy”. She appeared to be well-fed, clean and well made-up. Like the much too many, Lily was either stupid or misled in the nature of her amorphous animation, or someone paid her and put a sign in her hand.

Like so many people, Lily is living off the fat of the land. It is not a bad life. That is why so many immigrants come to this country.

We don't say anything negative about her call for anarchy because she is a Hispanic person. We are all cowed into fearing being labeled “racist”. In fact, we consider her kind of heroic since she is featured on CNN with no censure.

Lily states enigmatically, “There will be casualties on both sides. There will be, because people have to die to make a change in this world,” she continued. “Trump, enough with your racism. Stop splitting families. Don’t split my family.”

So, there must be casualties, because Mr. Trump has been “splitting families” (even though he hasn’t held political office yet.) This seems something of a non-sequitur.

One might guess that her baffling statement has to do with illegal Mexican immigrants wanting to bring other family members to the United States. Sorry, Lily, but I don’t want to die for your right to break immigration laws.

See, these things are set in law books, and it takes legal action to get them changed. We do have limits on the numbers and qualifications of immigrants which are allowed into the United States annually. You either qualify or you do not, and it all stands on current immigration law (not Donald Trump).

If people like Lily were interested in facts, they would know that President Obama is known as the "Deporter in Chief" for the large number of illegal, mostly criminal, aliens which he has sent toting. Ah, but he is a person of color, so therefore, he too, cannot be criticized.

In fact, his decisions in this matter have been correct, and they are commensurate with those of Donald Trump. (This, according to all the major news outlets.) Yet, despite the pesky facts, Berkeley students are protesting to coerce their school president to make their campus, post-Trump, an immigrant asylum zone.

Why they have remained mum for the past eight years is a mystery.

Now, here is a thought project: what if the sign-carrier were a Cliven Bundy-type telling the government to stay off his land? That he is not going to pay the BLM grazing fees – that he would also like to break the law, like Lily -- and that he too says, “People have to die.”

Would we be kindly disposed to Cliven’s call for blood? Perhaps deify him, too, on a CNN clip?

What if it were a Branch Davidian member in WACO, Texas, calling for people to die? That would have been ironic, since they were the ones who got killed (76 of them).

They were killed in 1993 in their religious compound after a 51-day standoff with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for suspected weapons violations. It has been postulated that the WACO deaths, in combination with those at the Ruby Ridge standoff a year earlier, were the tinder that set off the Oklahoma City (OKC) Bombing by McVeigh and Nichols exactly two years following WACO.

In 1995, OKC killed 168 people, injuring over 680. National mass killings have been with us more or less since then.

Killing is never a good way to solve a problem. It breeds more violence and killing to avenge the deaths, ad infinitum.

The nation's fear-mongering and anger escalation needs to end. The people must direct their energies to building, versus destroying.

Trump has been called upon by the press to address the rioters. But the rioters have some vague notion that they are rioting against him, so that doesn’t make much sense.

The press would be on standby, ready to call him an “interloper”, someone who does not respect democracy or President Obama, a bumpkin, tone-deaf, a jackboot or some other derisive epithets which they might conjure.

It would be like throwing butane on a fire, and Mr. Trump has rightly not made comment. What could he say after the press has had its year of evil play . . . “Don’t hate me?”

No, it must be a concerted effort, and President Obama could play a great role. By onboarding the President-elect and addressing the nation as a team, the two men could appeal to the nation’s heart and soul.

Perpetuating and fomenting protests against a legally executed election and duly-elected President shows a total lack of faith in our country. It is a sad spectacle on the part of all the players.

 --Hatfield Clan

Our nation outgrew the Hatfield and McCoy grudge matches in the 19^th Century. It would be a pity to resurrect them now.

Sad Lisa

_____________________

Maybe it's premature to borrow Cat Steven's song title.  It's spoiled sport to say "I told you so". The United States may be post-courtesy and post-propriety -- its own unique manner of being "post-Puritanical", as the erosion of the superficial reveals our asperity -- but it is not yet post-racial.

The Presidential election of 2008 should have been a runaway for the Democrats; the people were tired of the failed wars and the abysmal economy.  Because the party took a chance on candidate Obama, it was not a runaway, though it was a win.  Today, many seem to have all but forgotten what party delivered us into the chasm, and they are ready to swing back, for visceral reasons.  If Romney wins, it will not be the 1% who elect him.

Because it was President Obama who presided over a country in duress, it is he who will be blamed for not turning it around (a trick probably no president could have accomplished in one term.)  Because it was he, he will be judged doubly harshly.  Because he has actually ascended the American throne of power, he has stupefied and angered those with entrenched prejudice, those who think white men speak for them (even when they don't.)

Listening to Cat Stevens last night brought the thought to mind.  Despite his unquestioned excellence as a musician, when Stevens converted to Islam in 1977 (becoming "Yusuf Islam"), he endured no end of disdain.  No doubt part of that was spawned from fans who wanted Cat back, but there is also no doubt that disdain and intolerance of The Other played a part, the fear that such a great guy had been so readily "brainwashed".

Many of you voted President Obama into office, but you may not be able to keep him there, and that thought does not please me.  One of the deciding factors may be because his race has put a stick in the hornet's nest of latent American racism, and it is easy to lump our current failures upon his perceived inabilities.  For some people, their disappointment is independent of race, but not for a great many others who see Obama's background as a community organizer as a pander to special interests, which means, not them.

If he wins, it will be in the sort of squeaker John F. Kennedy pulled out over Nixon. (Per our own experience with voting here in Florida, if you're the distrusting sort, beware -- the Romney's own an interest in a voting machine company.)  Some will say Obama deserves to lose based upon his performance, but surely this is a case where there is no magic fairy in the wings to make things any better.  Things are already very tough for the average American, and further compassionate austerity measures as promised by the beaming, lying Romney will only further harshen the lives of the average citizen.

Unfortunately, per usual, our eyes are taken elsewhere, to topics that do not directly affect us, and the charlatans perform their legerdemain as if to a metronome.  And the people, those who listen, sit awash in a welter of lies and bad information.

Ultimately, as they always do, they will default to their primitive calculus that will produce for them no matter how uneasily, at least the ersatz image of a President to take them through the next term.  Each voter's ability to imagine depends upon how far evolved he is from his received self-image; most people cleave to those images that proved at least the semblance of security, and that usually means someone who looks and sounds like them, no mater how marginally.

What the people now know most is, it will be a rocky next four years; they will all be, as we have become acclimated to that expectation.  They hope the price of gas will not rise too much, but they know it will spike and fall in response to the vagueries of the trading markets.  Even many of those with conviction are willing to let their environmental sensitivities erode, a bit, if it means the oil will keep flowing, petroleum addicts that we are, and like addicts everywhere, the pushers do not care that we get better.

Our science is reduced to a shell game, global warming, a mere theory.  Of course, even if the harbingers like this year's massive crop failures turn out to be a one-off, why not prepare by putting on the petro brakes and really trying for a shift?  Instead, the 50% (more?) of Americans who do not wish to be weaned (who have had too much taken from them already) cry out that coal and oil can fuel us for, why, the next 100 years!  At least that.  And somehow, when they turn of the lights and nod off, they feel better with that thought.

Here are the betting margins from the South (and you should not dismiss this as being a representation of solely the "Ricky Bobby" South), where even (and especially) the power elite will muse on game day (that's football), "I wonder if our niggers will beat yours?"  It may be the older generation which says it aloud, but the tension remains in their scions.

Many have opened their hearts after a lifetime of seeing the inequities, but many, too have fallen victim to the equal opportunity policies they once championed.  Changing one's bedrock thought, the thing that allows one to maintain his identity in a tumultuous life, is a difficult thing.

Hollywood is doing its part, but some resent the patronization.  We now have Latina and black glamor with J-Lo and Halle Berry and all who have followed, and stories like Monster's Ball.  This is not Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino) anglicizing her look by dying her hair and doing electrolysis on her hairline  -- this is a celebration of otherness.  However, it has all passed relatively quickly, and the anguish portended by Thomas Jefferson still perdures, namely, that slavery will be the burden of this nation.  So it is.

Last week I read a book review of the last known lynching in America which took place in 1934 Marianna, a little town to the West of Tallahassee.  Friends have shared with me stories of being invited to lynchings to the East (in Live Oak), and of the KKK parades down main street.  The people who share these stories have opened their hearts and grown to one degree or another, but by their own admission, their fellows have not.

My mother moved to Miami in the early 1960's and was amazed to see "WHITE" and "BLACK" signs over the washing machines in the laundromats.  She thought, "How neat -- they keep some washers for white clothes, some for darks." Then someone told her the truth: The signs were for the color of the people, not the wash.

Why do people hate?  I have no answer, but it perdures like the hardest things in nature.  Nations (people) have always warred over land to which they feel entitled, deciding the current inhabitants too stupid or venal to be allowed to continue.  That disdain is based in long-held prejudices based upon religion (ironically), race or creed.  Our story of the Hatfields and the McCoys provides a sad slogfest embodying the persistence of hatred, it's power to drive even mindless self-destruction.

Self-destruction.  There is something seductive and dark about the impulse: If I can't have it, you can't either.  Some people see Obama as Other, Romney as Self, even though it is not remotely true.

These people will not be able to see Obama as one of them, as an American, and they will vote against their interests in order to dislodge the Interloper, as they see it.

High Flying Circus

--Obama's Red Tails,
David Fay/Hruska

The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day;
the sharpest sight cannot discern them.
God has so many different unsearchable ways
of taking wicked men out of the world
--Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,
Jonathan Edwards

We breed wars.
We carry it like syphilis inside.
Dead bodies rot in field and stream
because the living ones are rotten
--The Lion in Winter (1968)

Much casual death had
drained away their souls
--More Light, More Light,
Hannah Arendt and
Heinrich Blucher

Bend them trucks
We do it for fun
Stack them bucks
We do it for fun
--Shake Ya Tail Feather,
Nelly
________________

The recent New York Times' mephitic paean to President Obama's death-dealing drone program notes the president's recourse to the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine.

We understand Obama is being painted as an intellectual, but he is also supposedly a Constitutional law scholar, so why would he not seek precedence in the current legal thought and treaties? Why is our secular Chief Executive being presented as someone seeking guidance from ancient and medieval Catholic Church theologians? It could not be the result of any realpolitik, could it?

Augustine's Just War theory does not vindicate preemptive war anyway -- only defensive; it should not be the standard of current war behavior, anyway. It does not address the killing of civilians. Augustine and St. Thomas have been superseded by the U.S. Constitution, the Hague Conventions, the Geneva Conventions and many other legal precedents (including the Nuremberg Principles and the U.N.Human Rights Declaration, which celebrated its 64th anniversary today.)

By what authority does a United States President authorize the Central Intelligence Agency -- a civilian agency -- to kill citizens under the false rubric of war?

Thomas Aquinas twisted the teachings of Jesus to justify the Church's support of monarchs which then send Christians off crusading for mortal causes benefiting both institutions . The Church's apotheosis of the monarchs strengthened the Church's cause, as both could then rule over the interests of man via God's investiture. This nod to St. Thomas and Aquinas as directing doctrine for Obama's drone policy violates the principle of separation of Church and State.

Obama is not even the least of prelates, possessing no divine right to rule or to arbitrarily advocate for the killing of someone he deems a fit target. As a nation, the U.S. has left God and the Church out of our national planning process Wars of aggression are criminal ventures.

If the President must seek recourse to religious thought, why not turn to the 20th century's Martin Luther King, Jr., a minister who turned against war as an expression of American philosophy? King saw that killing was not the way to weave the fabric of a just American power.

Speaking of realpolitik, perhaps Obama's team does not see use in borrowing the ideas of a black reverend -- Obama already has that race card punched, and incendiary reverends like his own mentor Rev. Wright have not done well for securing Obama's legacy.

Mr. Obama is staring down even younger potential Republican opponents, like Florida's junior Senator Marco Rubio. Talking demographics: Obama can never be younger, Latino or Catholic. He may have New School music on his iPod, but how to cast the re-election net wide enough to win? He has Eva Longoria and Ricky Martin; maybe his handlers feel that appealing to Catholi
theologians provides him another foot in the door.

--by Lisa and Jim